Inflight VR Now Offering Emmy Award-Winning Virtual Reality Content

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The People's House
Emmy Award-winning The Peoples House, a deep dive tour of the Obama-era White House, is now available to all of Inflight VR’s airline customers. Image via Felix & Paul Studios

From LEGO-branded to Emmy Award-winning virtual reality (VR) content offerings, Inflight VR has had a very busy couple of months.

Inflight VR has partnered with Felix & Paul Studios to bring Emmy Award-winning VR content to aircraft. The APEX member has adapted four of the immersive experience pioneer’s most memorable VR productions, for immediate release to all of its airline customers.

“This is one of the first times in the history of the aviation industry that an airline is offering a technology on board that many passengers don’t even have in their homes.” – Nikolas Jaeger, Inflight VR

This unique content partnership includes a two-part VR series narrated by Oscar-winner Brie Larson entitled Space Explorers 1: A New Dawn and Space Explorers 2: Taking Flight. Produced with the cooperation of NASA, Space Explorers takes a sumptuous 360° look at mankind’s quest to understand our planet, our universe and, ultimately, ourselves, as we reach to the cosmos for answers.

The third project in the pact, Strangers, is an intimate, one-on-one master class of sorts with Canadian singer-songwriter Patrick Watson. Filmed on location in his Montréal studio, Strangers won the Proto Award for Best Live Action Virtual Reality Experience in 2014.

Rounding out the offerings is The Peoples House, a deep dive tour of the Obama-era White House that offers viewers extraordinary access to places official guided tours rarely venture. Tracing the rich history of the White House from the past two centuries up through the eight years of the Obama administration, The Peoples House also took home the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Interactive Program in 2017.

“This collaboration with Felix & Paul Studios will take the immersiveness we provide to our airline customers to another level,” Inflight VR’s co-founder and head of Content, Nikolas Jaeger, told APEX Media. “F&P are really leading the way with high quality VR content right now. The fact that they won an Emmy for their content further proves that VR has arrived and [that] exciting times … lie ahead of us.”

And while Jaeger said he is thrilled by this new era of VR innovation with its bigger budgets, higher quality lenses and improved screen resolution, his favorite part of the job is watching passengers interact with VR for the first time on an actual airplane.

“This is one of the first times … that an airline is offering a technology on board that many passengers don’t even have in their homes yet,” Jaeger noted. “For me it is so exciting to see the passenger’s reactions, ranging from tears of joy, to open mouths and laughter, disbelief and amazement. VR is an experience rather than just information and that’s what makes it so powerful.”

Inflight VR’s chief marketing officer, Matthias Walther seemed to agree, telling APEX Media that his favorite thing to see is the level of genuine immersion of passengers watching in-flight VR. “Every passenger reacts differently to the experience, but a lot of them lean back and stretch out their legs once they put on the headset. It’s like they are literally forgetting where they are,” Walther added. “We even had a few wiping tears off their eyes when they were done. It’s just really cool to see that sort of emotional reaction to technology.”